Book Review: The Hit by Melvin Burgess

The Hit

Melvin Burgess

304 Pages

Published February 25th, 2014

Live the ultimate high. Pay the ultimate price. The shocking return to YA by the author of SMACK.
A new drug is on the street. Everyone's buzzing about it. Take the hit. Live the most intense week of your life. Then die. It's the ultimate high at the ultimate price. Adam thinks it over. He's poor, and doesn't see that changing. Lizzie, his girlfriend, can't make up her mind about sleeping with him, so he can't get laid. His brother Jess is missing. And Manchester is in chaos, controlled by drug dealers and besieged by a group of homegrown terrorists who call themselves the Zealots. Wouldn't one amazing week be better than this endless, penniless misery? After Adam downs one of the Death pills, he's about to find out.

When I first received The Hit for review I was so excited to dig into it and see what this deadly drug was all about. While the book was an entertaining read, I did have my issues. Questions kept popping up in my head, and none of them were really answered, or were answered poorly. For example.. I just didn't find the story all that realistic. How can this tin little pill create the BEST week of your life, all before killing you?! You'd think it'd be out of your system by then or would have killed you sooner, right? What's even weirder is that it's exactly one week later the user dies, like, down to the minute. Just hard for me to believe.

The only other issue I had was that Adam was completely annoying and a total jerk. All he cared about was committing crimes and doing as many selfish things as he could in his last days of life. I understand that he really wanted to live it up, but couldn't he have had some better things on his bucket list? Swim in the ocean or climb a mountain or something like that? Not sleep with multiple women at once, get someone pregnant and kill someone? His character annoyed me so much that it made it hard to enjoy the story because I kept getting so bored with it.

The plot was pretty predictable but still enjoyable. We have the story of Adam and his ride with Death, and we have the undergoing plot line of the zealots and the revolution they are trying to begin. Chaos is rampant and it's clear that the government has pretty much ruined the country, though we never do figure out how this started or exactly what was going on behind the scenes. I liked all the non-stop action with Christian (the craziest character I've read about in a while!) and the zealots. Hope crept into my veins every time an antidote was mentioned, even though people kept denying the possibility of one.

Though this book irked me at times, I don't regret reading it. There was a lot of issues but the general premise was good and the plot interesting enough to almost override my issues with it. Though definitely not a favorite, I'd still recommend it to certain groups, particularly teenage boys who may relate with the main character a bit more than I did.